Steve,
You should like it. The idea was already implemented at Michigan once
(ifs, the intermediate fileserver)
Derrick
On Apr 14, 2010, at 10:36 AM, Steve Simmons <[email protected]> wrote:
On Apr 13, 2010, at 10:12 AM, shruti jain wrote:
The project aims at developing a system which would use
collaborative caching techniques to improve the read accesses in
OpenAFS. This project is based on two observations.
Firstly, in a cluster environment, a large number of clients need
same datasets to work on i.e. the data on which client nodes need
to execute is same for many other nodes on the network. Currently,
each client contacts the server individually to fetch the data.
This increase load on the server unnecessarily. If the size of the
file is very large then the problem would be highly magnified.
Second observation is that the local bandwidth are mostly fast and
runs into Gbps. In a cluster, many clients would share the same
geography and thus have fast interconnects between them. The server
might be connected through a slow network link. In this situation,
accessing data from another client would be much faster than
accessing data from server itself.
Just one guy's opinion, but I like this. The more I think about it,
the more I like it.
One long-term benefit of this is in clusters. We've seen a number of
instances where folks have attempted to use AFS as if it were a
clustered file system, keeping various lockfiles, etc in the fs. It
beat the hell out of our AFS servers when it happened. If a fs could
delegate responsibility for such lockfiles to a local node, it's
make that sort of thing feasible and fast.
Steve
